Category Autodesk History

Throwback Thursday – AutoCAD-80 version 1.2 Circa 1982

I may have found someone with the oldest AutoCAD release software outside of Autodesk. Of course internally we had early 1.0 alphas, betas, and development copies that were never released. In fact AutoCAD-80 and AutoCAD-86 version 1.0 was never commercially…

Throwback Thursday – Space Shuttle

AutoCAD 1.4 circa 1984/85 and the Space Shuttle drawing by Autodesk founder John Walker. This is one of the earliest known DWG sample files used to show AutoCAD-86. I captured this on a retro 286/287 that I run in my…

Throwback Thursday – Mining Data from Old AutoCAD Floppies

If you read the word “Floppies” and scratched your head, you might be less than 30 years old and never seen what we had to work with to store data and install products back in the early days. There were…

AutoCAD Release History – 35 Releases and Counting

AutoCAD Release History() AutoCAD 1.0 December 1982 (Release 1) AutoCAD 1.2 April 1983 (Release 2) AutoCAD 1.3 August 1983 (Release 3) AutoCAD 1.4 October 1983 (Release 4) AutoCAD 2.0 October 1984 (Release 5) AutoCAD 2.1 May 1985 (Release 6) AutoCAD…

Throwback Thursday – 3ds Max Flashback

I have been using 3DS Max since release 1.0 and 3D Studio for DOS before that where we had the Shaper, the Lofter, and that other mode I always forget when animation was really hard and rendering frames took hours…

Solar System Drawn to Scale in AutoCAD DWG

An oldie but a goodie! Back in AutoCAD version 2.18 (circa 1985), Autodesk placed a sample drawing with AutoCAD named the Solar.DWG to demonstrate the precision of AutoCAD back in the early eighties. AutoCAD was based used 64bit floating point…

Congratulations Old Timers

At 22 years with Autodesk, many consider me an “old timer”,  but I’m really not compared to others at Autodesk. Internally back in the day Autodesk employees referred to themselves as “deskers”, and “old timers” was a term of respect…

Learn AutoCAD Cassette from 1986

In a blast from the past I took the infamous cassette tape in my Autodesk historical collection and purchased a cassette tape to MP3 converter to see if the 34 year old cassette had anything good on it after all this time, and who was the voice on the tape.

The cassette was still good! Low and behold it had someone I had not expected, Autodesk founder John walker narrating the 30 minute cassette tape and at the end talking about product support and bug reporting. Upon listening I was transported magically back to 1986.